(This is a migrated post from an old version of the site, carried over for posterity).

Monday’s Markets Point To…Who Knows?

August 1st kicked off a 3-day bender on Wall Street to unload stocks, with prices cratering on Monday the 5th. The sell-off left the Dow down 1,033 points, and the NASDAQ down 500 and change. The tech-heavy NASDAQ took it harder than most because guess what? Companies like Microsoft literally took $19B (that’s $19 Billion, or $19,000,000,000) and set it on fire “training and building AI” only to… post a less than stellar quarterly number. And it’s not just Microsoft- leaked emails from Nvidia claim that the company is scraping “a human lifetime’s worth of videos” DAILY to train it’s infinite if/then loop (come on, tell me AI isn’t just one giant decision tree of IF and THEN statements). It lead to a conversation with my best friend as to which would have had less of a climate impact- $19 Billion of cloud compute resources and GPUs pissing away electricity and generating heat, or the carbon release of just piling $19B in cash in the middle of your backyard and lighting it on fire. You can guess which is killing us faster.  At the end of the day, just stop caring about this crap, it’s not good for your mental health.

It’s Clown Shoes All The Way Down

Clownstrike, as they will now henceforth be called for all eternity, has told the likes of Delta- yes the company that crams you into a wingy tube thing and hurls you through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour with the expectation you don’t die in a fiery crash, to pound sand and that “it’s not our fault” we took down all of your computers during last month’s botched update THEY pushed out without testing properly.  We love a good meme, but when human lives are at stake and you fuck up the one job you have, taking the position of “our liability is limited to only a few million dollars” and “it’s not our fault you used our software” are probably NOT the best approach.  If, like me, you run your company’s IT infrastructure, remember this when shopping for solutions. To make matters worse, they’re throwing such a tantrum over the “Clownstrike” name they’ve taken to muscling customers like Clownflare (yep, calling them that too) to block access to the Clownstrike website. This is why I self-host this dumpsterfire of a website you’re reading this on- I’m so uncancelable Trump has been calling me nonstop.

Harris Picks FillThisInLater

As of 7:42AM Central Daylight time we have yet to officially hear who VP Kamala Harris has picked for her running mate for the 2024 election, but the much-chatted-about “shortlist” of folks include the first publicly out Transportation Secretary who is actually enforcing traveler rights when Crowdstrike breaks your airline, a sailor turned Astronaut turned congresscritter, and some guy they keep referring to as genocide Josh. I worry she will pick the hero we deserve and not the hero we need. This election has been fraught enough with insanity, it would be nice if someone would just do the right thing for once and not pick the guy who’s been soft on oil companies and climate when… ya know… the feels like in Chicago was 104 degrees yesterday (I get it’s summer, but come on).

7:50AM Breaking leak from CNN: Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, has been tapped as the VP pick for the Democrat ticket for the 2024 election. No formal statement from the campaign org as of yet, but we’re keeping this regardless as a living document of the leak.

Compuserve Still Lives, Becomes My Homepage

At least for the time being. Call it nostalgia (I mean this IS “retrotech.io”), whatever, but Compuserve‘s homepage is not only still alive but super clean and minimalist… the way the web should be if you ask us. But we’re probably a poor sample given we still think there are too many images on our own site.

Google Loses DOJ Antitrust Suit

FINALLY, some good news- the US Department of Justice has won their argument that Google is a monopoly- at least on search. This could have wider implications for the market and the horrible ads polluting your search results. Ultimately, the losers here will be you and I who are just trying to find things on the web, because that’s how these things always work. Frankly, given the fact that Compuserve’s web page is still online, I’d LOVE going back to the old directory-style engines that require ME to approach the directory and say “list my site” instead of blowing my bandwidth budget on bots thinking they’re entitled to the information on my site.

RetroTech Tuesday Tip: Do Yourself A Favor And Install Linux Today

Yeah I’m one of those assholes. But no, seriously, slap Xubuntu on something and download something called Chicago95. Enjoy your Windows 95 styled desktop.

Ziff Davis Still In Business, Buys Old Business Daddy

Ziff Davis, yes THAT Ziff Davis, is apparently not only still in business, but has enough cheddar to buy out CNet for $100M. Those of us who’ve been trying to survive this fucking horror show known as “tech” long enough remember that CNet bought Ziff Davis back in 2002. CBS bought CNet (and Ziff Davis) back in 2008, and through various spin-offs, acquisitions, etc., we’re now here. CNet has turned into a hollow shell of it’s self in recent years, so I’m really not sure what exactly Ziff Davis is buying here. Regardless, you can guarantee it doesn’t include a relaunch of ZDTV (which became TechTV, then G4TV, then whatever Comcast has turned it into) so if you need your daily fix of The Screen Savers, you need to hit up archive.org for the old episodes.

Coming Soon: Yes You Can Sync A Palm Pilot In 2024

Because fuck storing your calendar and contacts in the cloud. Did I mention “Bejeweled”?

Updates Throughout The Day

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